No other writer has been associated with one particular area as Thomas Hardy is identified with Dorset, his Wessex.

One of the many joys of Hardy's work is that a reader can actually go to the precise locations featured in the famous novels including Under The Greenwood Tree, Far From The Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

This DVD shows how Hardy's life and art intertwined - how one was the inspiration for the other - and we go back, as Hardy did, throughout his life, to his birthplace Bockhampton; to Stinsford where his family attended church and where the heart of Hardy was eventually buried; to Dorchester, the inspiration for the Mayor of Casterbridge; to Boscastle and St Juliot Church where he met Emma his first wife; and to his family home, Max Gate.

The programme is presented by two of the world's leading authorities of the life and works of Thomas Hardy - Martin Seymour-Smith, the latest and most controversial biography of Hardy, and James Gibson, editor of his collected poems.